Such Is Life.

In November, if I'm still alive, I will be 61 years old, and if life has taught me anything, it is this: people are stupid, ungrateful assholes. We never appreciate ANYTHING. We judge and find lacking everyone who has ever loved us or tried to do anything for us, and, like the song says, we never know what we've got 'till it's gone.

 I speak from experience. My name is Lois, and I am an asshole.

Truth be told, I have never understood anything. Born the third daughter to two horribly damaged people who survived the Great Depression (now THAT was an accurate description for life as we know it) and WWII, we all clung on to life trying to be happy without knowing what the rules were.

We failed.

Why did we fail? To steal a line from Don Quixote, because we saw life as it is, and not as it should be. When we ask "why", it is not to ask why we are dying, but why we had ever been born, and maybe we ask because we are disconnected from everything, like an amputated limb, we shrivel and rot. Without  any connection to anything there is nothing. No purpose. No joy. No reason to even exist.

My deepest regret in life is that I could not MAKE anyone happy. Nothing I did altered anything. My existance changed nothing for anyone. We are given such a brief span of time to touch the world, and it blinks out, leaving a scant few who remember you only as a disappointment, if at all. All I had to give was my time. My gift to my children was simply...time. And freedom. I tried to give them as much freedom as I could, because I knew that once you are alone in the world, freedom is a rare commodity.

Of course, that was interpreted as, what? Neglect, apparently.

Well, shit. You do what you can, and that's all you can do.